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Pakpahan Christina Natalia
Student at the Graduate School of Global Information and Telecommunication Studies

I am from Jakarta, Indonesia, a country home to many ethnicities with their own unique cultures and languages. I belong to one of Indonesia’s oldest ethnic groups, the Batak, and was born in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra.

With friends from the Honjo dormitory

I enjoyed mathematics as a student. I enrolled at the Telkom Institute of Technology based on my father’s recommendation and grew interested in programming. I graduated and was employed by the Indonesian Department of Finance in Jakarta. After four years of database related work, I received a government scholarship with cooperation from JICA in 2012 and came to Waseda’s Graduate School of Global Information and Telecommunication Studies (GITS) as a research student. I had fulfilled my dream of studying abroad.

I think of ‘bushido’ when I hear the word ‘Japan.’ I have been in Japan for nine months and still admire how the Japanese to this day connect with each other through values of simplicity and frugality, honor and loyalty, politeness, and trust. Japan is a leader in several fields of technology, including telecommunications and its culture and technology makes it the perfect place to learn more about my field of interest. I live in the Honjo student dormitory where I have made friends with people from all over the world and been blessed with the wonderful opportunity to learn about various cultures.

At the Telkom Institute of Technology

I am researching recommender systems at GITS, which I hope will become useful for policy-making at the Department of Finance. In order to aid the development of Indonesia, I want to take what I have learned back home with me and spread the culture and technology of Japan throughout my own country.